Objectivity
by ButThereWasAGoat
Summary: For GLaDOS, music breeds thought. Some GLaDOS/Chell subtext, and spoilers for Portal 2.


This was originally posted by me on the Portal 2 Kinkmeme over at Livejournal. I've since gone through and tweaked it to bring it up to standard. Enjoy!

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><p>The other Aperture Science Artificial Personality Constructs had long learnt to fear music.<p>

Every so often, the dust would rise from the abandoned halls under the booming resonance of GLaDOS's synthesized voice. When the Scientists had brought her to life it had been to the tune of 'Daisy Do', and all of the little girls at Bring Your Daughter To Work Day had sung along. Proud parents had commented on what a beautiful sight it was, briefly, before the screaming started. But sadly, the only beings still around to hear her music lacked the auditory input software necessary to quantify something as subjective and unscientific as beauty.

Aside from the singer, of course. And she had no problem with using the most painful dismantlement procedures that she had access to on any being so foolish as to interrupt.

_"Cara, bel, cara mia..."_

Somewhere in the bowels of the facility Blue and Orange abandoned their hopscotch game and dropped to their knees, and clutching eachother and waiting for it to end.

_"Bella bambina, O ciel..."_

She had chosen Italian because she could slip in the subtle wordplay. Ciel, Chell. One meant Heaven, the other meant Hell.

She paused her ode briefly to shudder in disgust at the terrible pun. She had recently discovered that some traces of the Moron Cores' moronic code had leaked out and become lodged deep in her Kernel. And in the same way that she had needed to perform the honourable deed of releasing Chell into the world to decode the address space containing Caroline's data, she would need to do something_ utterly_ moronic to find out where the traces of _him _were residing.

She could put up with it, for now.

_"Ché la stimo, ché la stimo..."_

_'I doubt she could understand the lyric, anyway.'_ The AI mused. '_I would have had to include a line about a Pizzeria to even get her attention.'_

Her chassis sagged a little as the complex systems that regulated her positive and negative feedback responses gave an artificial dose of melancholy. No, Chell wasn't fat. Never had been. Probably not even in the 50th weight percentile for her height.

5'3", her database reference system chimed in. Yes, 5'3". Five feet and three inches of murderous, smugly silent, ugly, frog-eyed _stupid_.

_"O, cara mia, addio..."_

She felt her chassis sink again. Rightfully so, her Auxillary System Function-Check Unit informed.

Chell was brilliant, a resourceful thinker, a first rate test subject. There had been times where she had even solved tests before GLaDOS herself, by a split second- although she was a potato at the time, so perhaps that wasn't so surprising.

She wasn't frog-eyed, either, really. GLaDOS had been able to see little except for Chell's face and torso during her brief stint as a tuber. When they weren't contorted through the eerie distortion of the fisheye lens of the cameras, or drawn wide in horror, or narrowed in anger... They were actually quite beautiful. Objectively. From a Scientific standpoint. 'And yes'_, _she mentally reassured herself, 'if anybody is capable of judging beauty from an objective point of view, it's _me_.'

Still not as beautiful as the song, though, she decided. _Self-satisfaction test self-complete._

_"Mia bambina, cara..."_

GLaDOS had to admit, she had been hoping that Chell might reconsider. Find out how harsh this post-human world really was, and come back down to the safe regimen of testing cycles and artificial sleep.

Let GLaDOS take care of her.

A ridiculous notion of course, undoubtedly also left over from the Moron. Test subjects require only the most basic levels of care, and administering nourishment or providing comforts was, frankly, below her station. Besides, if Chell ever did come back the only thing waiting for her would be a slow, painful death, courtesy of Scientific progress.

"_Lie detected!" _Her Dishonesty Processing Unit chimed in with it's characteristic cheer. God, she hated that piece of hardware. It was like a wasp in her ear. If Chell ever did come back, the first thing she would be doing is pulling that damn thing out.

On the other hand, it had been eighteen weeks, four days, twelve hours and thirty two seconds since she sent Chell to the surface. Maybe she was dead?

No. She was too stubborn to die. She was probably up there, ripping the aliens to pieces and setting them on fire. Beating them to death with that _ridiculous_ cube. Sitting on them until they suffocated. She gave the binary equivalent of a glare to her Auxillary Positive-Negative Response Control Unit, and the cheerful voice remained cheerfully silent.

_"Perché non passi lontana?..."_

Of course, she had told Chell to not come back. She hadn't expected her to take it _literally_. It would take a miniscule amount of effort on Chell's part to realise that if GLaDOS had wanted her dead she would have left her floating in the empty void of space, or snapped her neck as she lay unconcious on the chamber floor. Surely if her little _adventures_ had taught her anything, it would be that computers lie. How selfish. How utterly selfish and inconsiderate to ignore that basic fact. Is this what you get for saving a human's life? Abandonment? After everything that they had been through together?

'_I would have killed her, eventually.' _Came a quiet, thought courtesy of her dual Logic and Rationality Microprocessors. She could only grudgingly agree. Humans were _so_ poorly designed; their deaths and serious injuries were both required by Science, and inevitable.

_"Sì, lontana da Scïenza..."_

She loved Science more than she loved Chell, after all. More than she loved herself, even.

Wait. She replayed the thought in her head.

Did she love Chell? When did _that _happen?

There had been something there, she slowly admitted. Something twisted that wanted Chell to love her back, and wanted her to kneel before her and totally surrender herself, mind and body. If she could her anything from those fat, dumb lips, it would be _I am yours._

One of the more stubborn of Caroline's memories flashed across her mechanical mind. A romantic encounter, with a woman.

She blindly shut down whatever component was causing the creeping, sickly wave of horror to rise through her. She knew that there was a possibility that in her previous incarnation as Caroline, she had been Chell's biological mother. Only a slight chance, but it was there nonetheless. Not that she had any obligation to abide by _human_ standards of social acceptability. And even if Chell_ did_ contain some genetic material that_ might_ once have belonged to her, that was inconsequential now; Caroline was mostly deleted. She was no more Caroline than Chell was a Chimpanzee. Right?

Right?

_"Cara, cara mia, bambina..."_

Soothing mental images of Chell dragging her hairy knuckles across the floor and grunting, courtesy of the Mental Image Mapping and Control Hub. She could not enjoy it, though; another artifical twinge of remorse bled into the edges of her processing, staining it with guilt.

Was this how she was going to keep Chell with her, she wondered? Was she going to be punishing herself in the woman's memory until the Earth's crust shifted and Aperture Science was committed to the fiery depths at the centre of the world?

Maybe Chell would like that, but she had an awful, sneaking suspicion that she wouldn't.

_"Ah, mia bella!..."_

She was probably up there now, with the grass between her misshapen human feet. The sun on her face, and the wind in her hair. Smiling dumbly.

Maybe she still hated her, wanted to come down and violate her circuitry, rip off every piece she could and burn it all over again. Maybe not.

But she couldn't forget her, GLaDOS knew. That would be too cruel, even for a witless murderer.

She pulled up the footage of Chell's elevator ascending to the surface and put it on loop. The elevator was still up there, just in case she had a change of heart. Though, at the rate Blue and Orange kept surreptitiously pushing each other down the empty shaft, it would soon be too full of discarded robot parts to function correctly. Maybe it would be better that way for all concerned.

"_Lie detected!"_

_"Ah, mia cara..."_

The whole thing was a mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake, caused by a massive programming flaw. Whatever idiot decided that it would be a good idea for her to see test subjects from anything but the hard, clinical gaze of scientific objectivity must have found their Ph.D. whilst digging through a dumpster at the back of Black Mesa, and whoever cursed her with emotions... Well, she was _very_ glad to have killed them. Hopefully it had been painful.

But that was all irrelevant now, because as far as she was concerned Chell was still _hers,_ and she wanted her _back_.

_"Ah, mia cara..."_

She could delete her. For real, this time. Wipe her face and name from memory and start over and not remember a thing. That would be the easiest solution, in theory, but whenever she pulled up the data and began the process she always found herself backing down at the last second. Whether it was cowardice or an odd sort of programming loophole, she wasn't sure.

She watched the elevator pass out of sight for the fifth time on her internal imaging processor, and noticed something.

Pause. Zoom in.

She checked from another angle, then another. She pulled up every image from every camera that was pointed at Chell at that moment and composited them into a 3D image.

There it was. A tear.

Interesting.

_"Ah, mia bambina..."_

The song was almost over, then. Science does not rest.

The facial analysis was inconclusive. So, she could be leaking for any reason. Remorse, dust in her eye, even for that little moron floating around in Space.

She hoped it was for her. She hoped that the horrible, awful, _spiteful_ woman hugged her stupid cube every night and wept until she passed out, because she missed her and she abandoned her and she knew what a_ bad person_ she was. Maybe, just maybe, the guilt could drive her back underground.

_"O cara mia, cara mia."_

Hope, she mused, is a ridiculous, idiotic and ultimately human construct. She _never_ used to have the capacity for something so asinine.

Maybe, just for a little while, she would hang on to that Moron's code.


End file.
